The pump should help pull the water through your water lines and therefore boost pressure. I haven't done it, but I've used a pump to push ice water through my chiller when I didn't have a hose available. I think pumping the ice water through is easier than trying to cool the chill water with ice. Just make sure the pump can't suck in any ice cubes.

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Delmarva United Homebrewers - President by inverse coup - former president ousted himself.AHA Member since 2006BJCP Certified: B0958

A March pump will not boost the pressure. The shut-off head (no flow) is either 4.3 or 12.1 feet. That is very little pressure. A typical desirable municipal water pressure is about 60 psi which is 138 feet of head. Even a house with poor water pressure is probably experiencing at least 30 psi (69 feet of head).

For recirc on the wort, wouldn't that stir up the break material? Or do you plan for that falling through the false bottom or something? I've considered the following modification of my setup for better and more environmentally-friendly cooling:

IC goes into wort, ice water is circulated via pond/aquarium pump through IC and then through the water cooling portion of a plate chiller. second pump pushes wort through the plate chiller and recircs into the kettle.

This seems like a much better option than what I'm currently using, which is basically wasting a ton of water.

Hook it up and see what kind of flow you get. It's more about the cooling water's velocity through the tubing than anything else. If it"s too slow it will just take longer to cool the wort, or you could get a bigger pump. If it's too fast you can throttle it with a ball valve on the outlet side of the pump. Either way you are taking advantage of a free resource, rainwater. If you really want to be green you can design a heat recovery system and put the waste heat to work on something else (like warming the chafing dishes you use to serve food to your friends who come to help brew).

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You can get a cheap pump at Harbor Freight that will beat the hell out of the March pump, as long as you are not using it hot or in contact with the beer. that said, I agree with the above poster who suggests recircing the wort with your march pump during chilling. It doesn't take a massive amount of water moving through your chiller to chill effectively. At some point you are just wasting water.

That said, during summer I can't get my wort chilled down far enough with just my chiller. I run off into the carboy/bucket and cool over night and pitch the next morning. I have never had an issue doing so.

I use a single immersion chiller with a 200 gph pond pump from Lowes that cost about $40. I push cold water through it to lower the initial temp then recirculate ice water to get down to 65F. Takes about 15 mins.

So I recirc the wort too, that sounds good, but should I be worried about break material?

The simple solution, if you have some extra time, would be just to let everything settle for 30 or so minutes after chilling down to your desired temp. Then just drain the wort from above the break material.